The Other Girl: A Midvale Academy Novel (13 page)

What? It could get worse?

“Gideon,” Mrs. Benitez-Jones said, “what do your parents do?”

“Well,” Gid said, “my mother manages a candle store.”

Mrs. Benitez-Jones’s eyebrows arched with barely restrained revulsion.

“And my father is the chief financial officer for Summer’s Eve.”

“Ay dios mio,”
Pilar said.

Gid was laughing so hard he had to put his napkin over his face. “I’m sorry,” he said to Pilar quietly. “I’m just so stoned.”

“That is a very juvenile joke,” Mrs. Benitez-Jones said.

“That’s exactly why it’s funny,” Gid said. He was choking laughing, taking in big gulps of air.

Mrs. Benitez-Jones didn’t even hear him, and she continued, “Particularly since I was trying to make a point, that perhaps your family doesn’t have the same expectations for you that we have for Pilar.”

Gid stopped laughing. He looked Mrs. Benitez-Jones square in the eye. “Look, Mrs. Benitez-Jones,” he began.

“Oh, no, Geedeon,” Pilar pleaded.
Oh no, the people at the next table are looking at us.
Pilar tucked her hair behind her ears and gave them a big smile. “Let’s talk about something—”

“Pilar,” Gideon said, puzzled, “who are you smiling at?”

“The people next to us,” she answered.

“Why?”

“Because…because they’re watching us.”

“Who cares?” Gid asked.

“I do. I am embarrassed.”

Gid gave Pilar a really sweet smile, and she actually blushed. I felt her face get warm. Then he squeezed her arm. I felt that too.

Gideon looks cute right now. Like, really cute.

“Pilar,” Gid said softly to her, “you don’t have to worry about what those people think. You don’t have to worry about what anyone thinks.”

Gid had no idea he was doing this, but he hit some deep place in Pilar. An image of Elias Ganz came into her head, and of Madison scolding her in the car. Then she looked up and saw her mother, her hard eyes, her stiff haircut.

Pilar stood up.
I’m so hungry, and I think that salad probably has some cheese in it, but I just want to get out of here.
“I want to go,” she said.

Gid jumped up. “All right,” he said. “I would love to go.”

Mrs. Benitez-Jones waved her drink in an arc above her head. Mr. Benitez-Jones sat up in his chair an inch. “Oh, Pilar,” Mrs. Benitez-Jones said. “Don’t be so dramatic.”

“If you want to know, I didn’t get the job because I think about my looks too much.” Pilar’s voice wavered. “And I think we know whose fault that ees.”

“Well,” Mrs. Benitez-Jones said crossly, “I’m certainly not going to sit here and be taken to task for encouraging basic grooming.”

Pilar gave her mother a very stiff hug. “Good-bye,” she said.

Mrs. Benitez-Jones was pretty drunk by now. Her eyes were hostile, and she turned whatever focus was left in them on Gideon. “So,” she said, “you were saying something to me.”

“Oh yes,” Gid said. “I was saying that you don’t know shit about me or my parents, and, if you’ll excuse me for saying so, you probably don’t know shit about Pilar.” The waiter appeared
with his drink. “Thanks, Buddy.” Gid said. He drank it in one gulp. “Ready?” he said to Pilar.

“Ready,” she said. They walked through the dining room, and several times their arms grazed. Pilar’s fingers brushed his, then his hers. He grabbed her hand. She squeezed, and he squeezed back.

I know that when a boy and a girl get into the back of a car together, and it is night, and they have had a little bit to drink, what happens next is pretty obvious.

I kept hoping the obvious wouldn’t happen. They sat close. I thought, maybe they’re just cold. Pilar let her knee rest against his. I thought, maybe her knee is tired from running. Then Gid said, you can lie down and put your head on my lap if you want. She did that, and I thought, Well, OK, not many people do that without making out, but some of them do. When she started to cry I knew it was over.

In situations like this, chicks start crying only because they don’t want to be the one who makes the pass.

“What’s wrong?” Gid asked, not just falling for the bait but swimming after it.

“My mother ees so fucked up,” she said.

“Well,” he said, “just because she is doesn’t mean you are. You don’t have to be like her.”

“I am like her,” Pilar said, bringing on a fresh round of sobbing.

“You’re nothing like her,” Gid said. “I mean, your mother isn’t fun. You’re fun. Remember the night we talked at Fiona’s in the chair?”

I remember that you had a boner the whole time.

I was in Gid’s head that night, but I didn’t know that. I was sorry to know now.

“Yes,” she said. “We were on Vicodin. Even my mom would be fun on Vicodin.”

“I don’t know about that,” Gid said. “Seriously. There’s something so…exciting…about being around you.”

“You actually really like me.”

Pilar stared to cry.

“I have to tell you what happened in Los Angeles,” she said.

She told him everything about Elias. “I was really slutty. It’s so embarrassing. But the thing ees that I thought he liked me, like I thought I was charming and cute and stuff. But he just thought I was…like, slutty. And then Madison—”

“I know, the dumb hottie comment,” Gid said. He tugged at his pocket square and then ripped it out of his jacket. He presented it to Pilar with a scrap of his jacket attached. She didn’t take it.
I like it in the movies where the boy dries the girl’s tears.

If I just blink at him and look sad, he’ll do it.

Gid took the hint.

If I keep looking into his eyes, he will try to kiss me.

Gid took that hint too.

I always wondered what would happen if I saw Gid fall for someone else through his eyes. That was my greatest fear. This was a hundred times worse. I could feel him touching her skin, feel his hand caress her face, her neck. I felt the softness of his hair through her fingertips. Worst of all were her thoughts:
Why didn’t I do this sooner? Gideon Rayburn ees amazing. I want him to be my boyfriend. I wonder eef he would be? Madison will make fun of me. Oh, who cares? I am not friends with her anymore anyway. It’s funny I thought the pocket square was so gay, because when he offered it to me, that was the best part of the whole night.

Edie came back from the library just before lights-out. I was sitting up in bed, staring into space. I was so pissed at the world. I was pissed at Pilar for taking my boyfriend. I was pissed at her for being so pretty. I was pissed at myself that I had tried to ruin the date and had probably just made it better. I was pissed at Gideon for his annoying gesture with the Diet Coke, and at Dr. Whitmeyer for knowing just enough about this being-inside-people’s-minds shit to fuck me up even more.

Edie didn’t ask what was going on, but I decided I couldn’t go through this alone anymore.

“I have to tell you something, and you’re going to think I’m crazy.”

“I already think you’re crazy,” Edie said, sitting down on her bed. “At least this is exciting.”

“No, like, really crazy.”

“Try me,” Edie said.

“I’m inside Pilar Benitez-Jones’s head,” I said. “I’m inside her head, and I hear all her thoughts. I know everything she does. And before that.”

Edie stood up. “Molly, I think you need help.”

I shook my head. “I need your help. I can’t just ask anyone for help. This is totally real, but I don’t want to go to a mental institution,” I said. “Look, let me prove it to you, OK?

“You’re going to prove to me that you’re inside the mind of Pilar Benitez-Jones? And this is why you’ve been so weird for the last couple months?”

I still wanted to keep the Gid thing to myself. Maybe it was stupid, but I didn’t want anyone to know I’d gone out with someone whose mind I was inside. It was just the worst form of desperation. So I just said, “More or less.”

I don’t know why I expected, after everything we’d been through in the last couple months, that Edie would just all of a sudden drop everything and be my best friend again. She got ready for bed, waiting, I guess, for me to say something else.

“We’ll do this Pilar thing tomorrow after the match. I’ll show you then.”

Edie said, “We can do it whenever you want.”

I was offended that she didn’t just believe me. I was beginning to see that, with this much shit going on, I had to really take it one thing at a time. I’d show her when we got back from ATAT. Correction, after we demolished Gates Academy in ATAT.

Gates Academy sat up on a bluff above a rocky beach north of Boston. It was just a next stop on that prep school train—people went to Midvale because they got kicked out of schools
like Exeter, and then, if they got kicked out of Midvale, which was kind of hard, they went to a school like Gates. The typical Gates guy had bleached blond hair and a dazed expression; even if not wearing a puka shell necklace, he looked like he was dying put one on. The typical Gates girl had wavy, windswept hair down to her tiny butt, and small braless breasts visible through a gauzy shirt. Everyone went barefoot, and in the winter, they wore moccasins, as if in homage to the Indian tribes who had been decimated in order to make way for a suck-ass prep school.

Before the match we had to stand around talking to the Gates losers. Mrs. Gwynne-Vaughan and the Gates faculty adviser knew each other and were talking some New Englandy bullshit like clambakes or Dutch elm disease or something. I was stuck talking to a girl with braids approximately the width and length of a baby anaconda. Her name was Isis, and I was pretty sure she’d been brought up on a commune and that her parents smoked a lot of pot. “History is my favorite subject,” she confided with poignant sincerity. “Because I am the reincarnation of Guinevere…you know, from Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table?”

“Wow,” I said. “Do you get déjà vu when you go to Round Table Pizza?”

The bell rang before she could respond.

The way Academic Tête-à-Tête works is that each team fields five players. There are four quarters, and you can sub out at the quarter. Each player goes tête-à-tête (head-to-head) with the same player on the other team, three times, three questions, per quarter. That is a round. Whatever team has won the most rounds at the end of the game wins. Any player can get any
question in any category, which is why it is so important to have a well-rounded team.

At the end of three quarters, we were already ahead by an embarrassing amount. Nicholas kicked the ass of some guy with puffy blond hair, Edie beat another guy with the same hair, but not as puffy, Mickey trounced a girl with a pierced tongue, and Devon surprised us all by knowing the order of the first three geological periods. “Precambrian, Paleozoic, Mesozoic,” he said. As he sat down, he whispered to Edie, “Of course my favorite era is the Stone Age,” and she laughed out loud.

It was at this moment I knew exactly what was going on with Edie. She had a crush on Devon. Devon. Fat, farting, but strangely attractive Devon.

Little Edie.

We won.

When we got back to school, Edie and I went back to our room and lay down on our beds for a while. Outside it was humid and all the outdoor-loving people were running around shouting and throwing Frisbees to one another. I looked out the window. Gid and Cullen were underneath a tree, lying down, staring up at the branches. I could tell they were totally fucking high just from looking at them, even this far away. Nicholas joined them, peeling off his ATAT tie, settling down cross-legged. Cullen sat up, went in his knapsack, and took something out of a Ziploc bag, and he handed it to Nicholas. Nicholas ate the thing quickly and without enjoyment, and then he lay down too. “Oh my God,” I said. “Nicholas and Gid
and Cullen are, like, fully hanging out on the lawn eating pot brownies. Or pot something.”

Edie stacked one foot on top of the other one. “Hmm, that’s fascinating. I’m kind of more interested in what Pilar’s doing.”

Pilar was asleep. She slept a lot. I guess she probably exhausted herself with all the math and crunches that she did all day. “Look, I can’t make her wake up!” I said.

“If you’re inside her head, couldn’t you just make a big cymbal clap inside your head?” Edie asked.

“That just doesn’t make any sense,” I said. “I’m inside her head, but she’s not inside my head.”

“How do you know?” Edie asked.

“Well, I guess if I were inside her head, I would hear myself.”

Edie nodded. “That makes sense.” She paused. “If you broke up with Gid, why are you watching him out the window?”

I collapsed back down onto the bed. “Because they’re there.”

We lay there for a while, listening to the shouts coming up from the quad and the sounds of lawn mowers and hedge clippers and various ringtones.

Finally Pilar was stirring. She rolled over and blinked at the ceiling and realized that she only had an hour until the gym closed. She jumped out of bed and dressed herself very quickly.

Edie let out a long sigh to indicate her patience was at an end. “I think I’m going to go take a shower,” she said.

I smiled at her smugly. “That’s a great idea,” I said. “But if you want to just wait one second, I think you should look out the window.”

Edie came to the window. I went in the closet and shut the
door. Pilar was just walking through the front door of the dorm. “All right,” I said, from behind the closet door. “She’s going to run across the quad, wearing a pair of black workout tights and a tight pink tank top with an om symbol stitched out of baby blue sequins in the center, in three…two…one.”

I expected to hear Edie gasp, but I heard nothing. Pilar was doing exactly what I said she would. “Whatever,” Edie said. “You could know she was going to wear that, and it is exactly five. Maybe that’s when she goes to—”

“Let me continue!” I called out from behind the closet door. “She sees a friend up ahead. It’s…oh my, it’s Madison! She doesn’t know whether to stop. She doesn’t. She waves quickly, with her right hand.”

“Oh my God,” Edie said. “You’re not kidding.”

I stayed in the closet, continuing to talk. “She runs to the left. Whoops. She’s got to tie her shoe. She’s up again. Oh shit. I think she may have forgotten something! She’s got a little pocket in the side of her pants! She’s checking it. There it is. You can’t see what it is. But I can. It’s the advanced stomach workout from
Muscle and Fitness for Women
magazine.”

Edie opened the closet door. “Holy motherfucking shit!” she said. “I…OK. I have to get a hold of myself.” She turned around in circles and watched Pilar continue across the quad. “This is fucked!”

Pilar scratched her head, and though I wasn’t looking out the window, I said, “Pilar just scratched her head. It’s so weird when she does normal things like that. It’s really terrible when she goes to the bathroom. Not just because she’s going to the bathroom, but because, well, she is Pilar.”

I was trying to make Edie laugh so she wouldn’t be quite so freaked out.

She fanned herself. “I keep feeling like this can’t be real, but it is. I’m sorry. I swear, mostly I just want you to be OK, but I am kind of like…Uh, I feel scared.”

“Don’t worry about me,” I said. “I’m fine. I’m just glad you know now.”

She looked like Edie again. Of course she was wearing mascara and lip gloss and had her hair combed. But she didn’t have that wall around her. Her smile was unguarded and warm, even if she did look freaked out.

I guess this was a moment where some friends might have hugged each other, but we had a joke: “Please hug me by not hugging me.” Direct affection made us nervous. Especially since prep schools are full of girls kissing and hugging each other and then immediately turning around and calling each other bitches.

It was enough just to have her look at me with an expression of real sympathy. “God,” she said, sitting down, seeming to make a decision to act normal even if she didn’t feel it. “That must suck. Being in Pilar’s head. I mean, it would suck in general. But now it must suck even worse.”

“What do you mean?” I said innocently.

“Uh, because of Gid,” she said.

I hoped I did a good job of trying to look unaffected by this. “It’s kind of weird, I guess. But mostly it’s just annoying. She does this thing where she, like, rates girls on how pretty they are,” I explained.

Edie was appropriately horrified. “It’s kind of impressive,” she said. “Ha. We should get her on ATAT.”

“Actually,” I said, “I forgot to tell you this, but the other day she actually gave you a high rating…on your clothes…. She spent, like, a full ten minutes noticing that you were dress
ing better.” I wasn’t lying, but I will admit that I had ulterior motives. I wanted Edie to tell me what the hell was up with her sudden attention to her womanly presentation.

She must have known it was bait, because she just said, “Well, maybe Pilar’s not that bad if she has noticed my overpowering hotness. Anyway. What have you tried to get out of her head?”

I didn’t want to tell her about Dr. Whitmeyer, because that might lead to questions that would lead to Gid. “I think I ended up in her head because I wanted to know what it was like to be her, maybe,” I said. “And now I know. She’s not that horrible, but I mean, I get it. She’s pretty and she has problems like the rest of us. Duh. I get it. So I mean, now that I get it, why am I still in her head?”

“Well, we have to try something,” Edie said. “I have some ideas.”

“You do?” I said. “You’re the best.”

Edie shrugged modestly. “I’m just glad we’re having fun again.” Then she looked serious. “I don’t mean to imply this is fun…. That was really selfish of me.”

“What, you mean being entertained at my expense? I’m just so glad you don’t find me boring anymore.”

Edie looked like she wanted to shrink away. “I think I just said that to be mean. My feelings were hurt. Do you know what I mean?”

Of course I did. I think half of what I say sometimes is just to see what people will do or say. It’s not the thing I’m proudest of.

“Do you know what I mean?” she repeated.

“It’s OK,” I said. “We’re young. I think we have a right to be emotionally immature.”

She laughed, and I felt pretty good.

Edie’s first theory for getting out of Pilar’s head involved the theory that I needed to do what Pilar was doing and actually think her thoughts. “It’s like basic physics,” she said. “You get your minds on exactly the same groove,” Edie said, “and maybe they will get so similar that they will repel.”

Pilar was still in the gym. Edie instructed me to lie down and close my eyes. “Imagine wearing what she’s wearing, thinking what she’s thinking. I’m going to set a timer for thirty minutes. I’ll leave. I don’t want my brain waves to interfere.”

I tried so hard. I felt her Lycra pants hugging my thighs and her hair on the back of my neck, and even tried to imagine having her neck, swanlike, silky. When she went down a long rabbit hole about her mother coming back from her trip and still finding fault with her weight, even though she was incredibly thin, I went with her, into every cranny of shame and self-doubt. I kept up count for count with a grueling series of leg lifts and crunches and some terrible thing where she got in a push-up position and then touched her opposite knee to opposite elbow for, like, eleven solid minutes.

Edie came back a half hour later. “Well?” she said.

I lay on my back panting. “I have much better abs, but unfortunately, I am still in her head.”